Pillars of Eternity - Interview @ RPS

Rock, Paper, Shotgun has another interview with Obsidian about Pillars of Eternity talking about the games mega dungeon.

RPS: How long do you think a run-through of the mega-dungeon will take?

Brennecke: I don’t want to say, but it’s probably going to be hours and hours?

Adler: It’ll be pretty beefy.

Sawyer: My direction for designing it has been that the ramp in difficulty goes up faster than you can level while in it. [laughs] So I kind of want the player to hit… You go through, you go down a couple levels, then you go to the next level and you’re like, “WHOA! Okay!” Either it forces them to get really serious about tactics, or they’re like, “You know what? I’m gonna go out to do some more quests, come back, and go deeper down.”

RPS: So it’s something you work through gradually.

Sawyer: Yeah. And we’ve come up with some ideas for mechanics that encourage continuing to return to the dungeon, so that it becomes kind of like a cyclical thing. You go down for a while, you back off, you deal with some things, and then you find a reason to go back down.

RPS: Is there a story surrounding the dungeon? Something huge and labyrinthine like the dungeon itself?

Sawyer: Yeah, yeah. You’ll start to learn [that there's a lot more to it than you first suspect]. Initially it just seems like a cursed, abandoned place. The Glanfathans warn people away from it. But they kind of say, “If you wanna go buck wild in here, it’s your funeral. Go down in there if you want.” As you go deeper you start learning more about what it was and what it is now and what’s going on in it. There’s a mystery. It’ll be a fun mystery to solve and get to the bottom of it.

The mega dungeon sounds pretty interesting, I like it when there are things in a RPG that are too difficult to handle when you first find them, that you can go back for later. It gives more of a sense of progress when your guys get more powerful.

I wonder if the mega dungeon is part of the story or if it is completely optional.

Originally Posted by ChaosTheory
I just hope there's a quick-travel way to get from level to level without having to run all the way back through each time you figure out you're in over your head…

I remember some games with large dungeons having shortcuts that open up every five levels or so. So when you clear the first five levels, the will be as level 1-5 stair. Something like that could be useful.